


hungry ghosts

by orphan_account



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Denial, Gen, Ghosts, Hospitals, Konohagakure | Hidden Leaf Village, Mental Health Issues, Sarcasm, Sasuke sees ghosts, Uchiha Massacre, Uchiha Sasuke Has Issues, Uchiha Sasuke-centric, he deals with his problems mostly via denial, my favorite combo, probabaly ooc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:13:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22089928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: He’s not sure who’s more surprised that he’s alive: himself, of the weird historical reenactment looming over him.Or, Sasuke can see ghosts when he wakes up after the Massacre.
Relationships: Senju Hashirama & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto
Kudos: 207





	hungry ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, y'all, this is my first fic uhhh ever so pls don't roast me too hard (or do but, like, constructively.) 
> 
> I'm a sucker for anything where the narration is as sarcastic as possible because this is how I also cope with my life, so that is how I wrote the narration. Does it fit with the traumatic experiences Sasuke's gone through? Almost certainly not. I also don't know how to just write a ton of angst, so it's like quick flickers of angst sandwiched between denial and sarcasm. Enjoy.

Sasuke feels like he’s been hit by a battering ram when he wakes up. 

Everything aches, every muscle trembles with fatigue, and trying to get up both takes way more effort than it should and fails. 

He’s not sure who’s more surprised that he’s alive: himself, or the weird historical reenactment looming over him. They lock eyes for a full second before he decides that he’s really never going to escape this nightmare because Itachi’s gotten more creative with his torture. He fixes his stare back on the ceiling, waiting for the weird dude with a dorky haircut and outdated clothes to stab him or gouge out his eyes or something. 

It doesn’t come. 

He looks at the weird guy again. There's no real point in delaying the inevitable unless Itachi's just trying to confuse him now. 

The weird guy looks just as confused as he feels. 

_Okay,_ he thinks. Whatever. No point in just lying around if he’s not gonna do anything, though this is a really weird genjutsu if that’s actually the case.

He awkwardly scoots himself around while moving as little as possible so his head is propped up uncomfortably against the metal headrest so he can get a good look at his pale blue hospital clothes.

He’s a bit surprised that there isn’t a gaping wound somewhere, or his fingers aren't missing, or that he can’t see his own lungs, or that there isn’t some bottomless voice whispering, _How about the soles of your feet?_

A sense memory accompanies the thought: the feeling of cold metal on the arch of his foot, pressure, pain, a scalpel breaking flesh. He feels abruptly sick, feverish. His pulse ratchets up several notches. His leg jerks involuntarily and violently, and it hurts so much, but at least it’s _something._

The pain prompts the rest his stupid, tired muscles into action, and this time he does manage to sit up. He just feels very, very sore, like he did one of Shisui's training regimens. Once he starts moving, he finds that it just burns a lot, but he can deal with that. His arms have decided to work again, so he throws the blanket off of him with sudden violence because he suddenly has to check. His feet are whole, clean, in fact. No missing toes, no blood. He flexes his toes, checks his fingers. There’s no dirt on his clothes, no stench of blood and death. He thinks that if he blinks, the illusion will dissolve, and he’ll be back with the voice and the man with the mask, telling him to count backwards from a thousand by sevens. 

The only injury he might have is on his right elbow, which is bandaged. 

The weird guy backed off, amazingly, so when Sasuke looks at him again, he’s a couple steps away at staring at Sasuke with confusion. 

His legs are half stuck through a chair.

Like, phased through, like he isn’t real, and—he isn’t real, Sasuke realizes with dread. Maybe he's crazy. Maybe this _is_ a genjutsu. 

Sasuke stares at Warring Clans-era guy before he realizes his feet are so cold that he can't feel them, and his helpful inner voice—funny he didn’t have that before the-before—takes the opportunity to remind him in a slimy voice, _How about the soles of your feet?_

He’s off the bed and across the room before he can think about it. The tile floor is unbearably cold to his bare feet, and he keeps feeling that knife cutting the tendons in his feet, dragging over each strand in the arch, slowly, steadily, and he really wants to be anywhere but here. It’s summer, his skin is covered in goosebumps, his teeth are chattering, his hands are shaking, and he needs to _get out of here._

Weird guy hasn’t said anything, and Sasuke isn’t about to poke that particular snake, so he hurries past him, slides the window open, and jumps out. 

The drop is only a couple floors, and Sasuke lands with a roll on a white rooftop so he doesn’t hurt his ankles ~~like Shisui taught him~~. He lands fine, but his legs almost crumple on him when he stands up. Maybe the effect of being unconscious for a day? His limbs ache but with soreness, not injury. He stretches briefly while he thinks of what to do next. 

It's easier to think out here. The roof is white, too, but it’s the warm kind of white, not cold and impersonal and heavy with the smell of disinfectant. The roof is hot, actually. He can see the heat rippling off the surface, and it's almost burning the soles of his feet, but he doesn’t mind, just revels in the warmth. Anything but the metal from before. 

“You can see me?” 

Sasuke jerks around, and there’s the weird guy. Of course, with a getup like that, he’d have to be a shinobi. He eyes the weird guy. Did he think anything about him was subtle? “Is that supposed to be a trick question?” 

Weird guy lights up like he’s gotten the best present he’s ever gotten. 

Sasuke is starting to regret waking up. Maybe he’s still in Itachi’s genjutsu? But usually, they didn’t even pretend to be innocent. And the world feels more real than Itachi’s genjutsu. Like he can feel its pulse underneath his feet. 

“I’ve never met somebody who could see me!” weird guy exclaims, and what is that supposed to… mean.

Sasuke looks at the faces carved on Hokage Mountain. He looks at the Warring Clans-era weirdo in Senju gear. He looks back at the mountain. If the First had long hair, they’d look pretty similar. Maybe the First did have long hair? It was a tradition of the Warring Clans era, that powerful people had long hair as a sort of dare, like a way to tell opponents, _you won't even get close enough to grab it._ The First certainly counted as a powerful person. Though Sasuke couldn't understand why anybody would let a clan and village leader go outside with that haircut. Still, if it were the case, he can’t imagine anybody wanted to carve all that into the mountain. Craftsman or no, it’s a lot of work for a dorky haircut. But weird guy caught his eyes flicking between him and the mountain, and he looks impossibly more eager.

 _Nah, that’s stupid,_ he thinks, shrugging it off. Far more likely he’s just crazy. 

He looks back at the (probably) physical manifestation of a mental break or something. Some clan members were a bit weird like that, but they didn't make too big a deal out of it. One of his cousins had to ask other people if they were seeing the things she was every so often, but that was mostly it as long as she ignored the stuff other people couldn't see. It was when she thought they were real that it became a problem, but that didn't happen very frequently. _Maybe if I ignore it, it’ll go away._

According to Cousin Asuka, it worked well enough. 

He walks towards the edge of the roof, resolved, and the not-First materializes in front of him. He really hopes this isn’t going to be a persistent thing because it’s going to get really annoying really fast. He has this grin like he’s expecting something from Sasuke. 

“Did you figure out who I am?” the guy says, looking like an eager puppy. 

Sasuke hopes mental breaks aren’t derived from his own personality because he doesn’t know where that comes from, and he doesn’t want to. Was this how he was like with Itachi? He grimaces at the thought, but he honestly can't remember how he behaved very well. He just did what he felt like without much thought, and for the first time, he wishes he was more conscious of how he behaved because he really can't remember. He eyes the not-First. Will talking to him encourage it? He’s already seeing imaginary people. Will talking to them make him crazier? It made Asuka seem crazier, but her hallucinations were, like, spiders crawling up her spine and people threatening to kill her. 

He thinks about it for so long that the guy’s face falls. He settles into the most dramatic sulk Sasuke’s ever seen, (and his eight-year-old first cousin, Asami, could _sulk.)_

Sasuke wonders if the weird dude’s personality is derived from Asami’s. 

Asami ~~isn't~~ wasn’t nearly so prone to mood swings, though. She sulked when she didn’t get her way, but her enthusiasm was more quiet, like she was afraid if she said she liked something, it’d disappear. This guy is so honest Sasuke seriously doubts he could be a shinobi. 

He misses Asami suddenly, though. She was always great at problem-solving, great at cutting through the unnecessary stuff to get to the real issue. He could really use her around because he has no clue what he's doing, and nobody to remind him of who he is. He misses her sharply like she’d taken a piece of him with her when she-when she— 

She had died on her porch. 

He knows because Itachi made him watch, though his genjutsu.

She and her mom, Second Aunt, read there in the evenings. They died together. Her pale fingers had been clutching Second Aunt’s, glued together by the blood that pooled around them from the slices in their necks. 

“Hey, you okay, kid?” 

“Mm… huh?” 

Weird guy points at his hand, which he realizes he’d been scratching very, very hard while thinking. Little scratches with tiny beads of blood decorate the back of his hand. He stops immediately, dropping his hand to his side and surreptitiously wiping the droplets on his hospital uniform. He really doesn't need people thinking he's crazy. 

Now he’s behaving weird even to his hallucination. 

He thinks of Asami one last time and tries to banish her from his mind. 

It doesn’t explain the ultra-traditional Senju getup anyway. 

The guy looks at him expectantly. 

Sasuke doesn't like that look. He shrugs. “I dunno. Shodai?” 

Which is the wrong thing to say because weird guy instantly cheers up. 

He stares at weird guy. Of all the people—of all the _things_ —he could’ve hallucinated, he’s hallucinating a historically accurate version of the Shodai? 

Great. He’s secretly a patriot. 

With that comforting thought, he starts jumping across rooftops ~~like Itachi taught him~~ , ignoring the pain in the soles of his feet when he lands on sharp rocks or glass. The hallucination follows him. He doesn’t appreciate the persistence. 

He also quickly realizes that he has no idea where to go. He’s not sure he’ll ever be ready to go back to the compound, which leaves him with approximately nowhere else to go to. Sasuke takes a sort of meandering route around the city, feeling odd. Empty? Like he can’t remember what it was like ~~before Itachi killed everybody~~. What did he do with his time? What did he think about? How did he behave?

He doesn’t know. He’s not sure he ever will. 

Eventually, he comes to stop in the residential district, leaving bloody footprints on the rooftop that he looks at with apathy. His hallucination hovers around him, suggesting that he should, maybe, find shoes or get his feet looked at or possibly stop jumping around rooftops. 

Sasuke isn’t about to go back to the hospital, but the hallucination makes a point that he should probably get shoes or something. He starts going down the building’s fire escape, only to narrowly miss getting hit by a window that slams open in front of him. 

He looks over. A vaguely familiar blond kid with one foot out his window is looking at him like _he’s_ the weird one in this situation. 

The First materializes next to him and says, delighted, “Is this your friend?” 

Sasuke wishes he could punch a hallucination. He determinedly ignores the First, trying to concentrate on figuring out where he’s seen the other boy. He’s really familiar. Especially with the marks on his face. Like whiskers. Like a cat? No, like… like a fox. That fits him more for some reason.

Fox boy says, “Why’re you dressed like that?” 

Sasuke opens his mouth, but _I snuck out of a hospital_ doesn’t seem like the best thing to say.

They stare at each other for a moment more before fox boy spies Sasuke’s feet. “Gah!” he shouts way too loud and gestures wildly. “Why don’t you have shoes?” 

Do people actually act like that? He sort of stares at fox boy. He's only seen one person act that dramatic, and that person is the hallucination standing next to them. Sasuke is starting to wonder if fox boy is a hallucination too even though he's pretty sure he knows him from somewhere until fox boy grabs him by his shirt collar and hauls him through the window into his filthy apartment. 

The First settles into an empty chair across from him. It's pushed in. His torso is half phased through the table and the pile of papers and discarded ramen cups on the table. “I like him,” he says, looking at the unwashed dishes, cluttered surfaces, and overflowing trash.

Sasuke looks at the stained floor and thinks of a pool of blood spreading, slowly, steadily, dripping between floorboards.

He wishes he could strangle a hallucination.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so that's the end. Is that a good end? Probably not. I'm not great at closure. 
> 
> It always kinda confused me that fics from Sasuke's perspective don't really mention the rest of his clan? Like, I assume that was almost his entire social circle up until the Massacre. I guess it's hard because there aren't too many people mentioned in canon aside from his nuclear family and Shisui, but he probably would've had friends among clan members his age and interacted with various relatives enough that most of what he's learned about life and human interaction is from them. Anyway, lots of Uchiha OCs.
> 
> Anyway, I'm not sure if this is a one-shot or what. If you think I should continue, I'll try to uhhhh draft an overall plot? If not, please leave feedback anyway? Thanks y'all.


End file.
